SOURCE: Spurgeon, Sara. “The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian.” In Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley, pp. 75-101. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Spurgeon suggests that Blood Meridian attempts to bridge the difference between the mythic representations of the old West and the true natural world, particularly through its reworking of the traditional figure of the sacred hunter.

One of the many complex relationships Cormac McCarthy explores in Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West is between humans, especially Anglo Americans, and the natural world. He does so in part through the manipulation of several archetypal myths closely identified with the European experience in the New World, and most specifically with the border regions of the American Southwest.

McCarthy moves Blood Meridian through the dark and disordered spaces of what...